We’ve dusted off our CDs of “Frank Herbert’s Dune” and watching it again. (The splendid 6-part SciFi TV miniseries, not the abominable movie). I am once again struck by Herbert’s prescience and prophecy.
I read the Dune series when it first came out in the 60s, and even though I found Herbert’s prose rather tedious, and his plotting a bit ponderous (if not totally impenetrable!), I was astonished at the scope and breadth of the novels and Herbert’s profound grasp of world events that were only just coming to a head at that time.
It would be all too easy to assign some undeserved role as clairvoyant or seer to the writer, to play the freshman lit class game of identifying the modern day referents for his literary symbolism. Its basically an adolescent exercise, but you can’t help but succumb to the temptation. It’s all there. The Butlerian Jihad is the backdrop to the novels, mankind’s devastating war against the machines, perhaps an analogue to our own industrial and digital revolutions, albeit with a different outcome.
A vital diminishing resource vital to world commerce, melange (petroleum), is restricted to a remote and desolate part of the universe, long colonized and exploited by the movers and shakers of the global civilization. Everybody has an agenda, a stake in the outcome, everyone gets assigned a role, all are connected and intertwined with the others: Western Civilization is the Empire, the Russians are the Harkonnens, the Arabs are the Fremen, and the Middle East is Arrakis itself.
All the players are accounted for, CHOAM stands in for world capitalism, the Landsdraad for the UN, and who gets to play House Atreides, America, the House of Saud or Iran? I guess it depends on whose side you’re on, doesn’t it? Any nominees for the Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit? And what do the Sand Worms symbolize?
It’s all nonsense of course, I don’t think Herbert himself would have seen it that way, he claimed no paranormal powers. But Herbert was an Arabist, fascinated with their culture and language, he had strong interests in ecology, politics, religion and history and how they interact; not to mention an insight into the concept of Messiah and a desire to explore its social consequences and psychological manifestations in a literary setting. It all adds up. Perhaps by accident, the novels are a useful guidebook to the timescape of 20th and 21st century history. They are essential to understanding today’s world, and perhaps yesterday’s, or tomorrows.
How is the spice to be “managed”? For the benefit of all Mankind? To meet the needs of those who can afford to consume it? For the profit of those who harvest and market it? To serve the people who, through historical accident, are entrusted its stewardship and have explored its potential? These are not questions for the merchant or the engineer.
And how does it end; holy war, a brutal religious dictatorship even worse than the evils it displaces? It is all a testament to the uneasy truth that even the ability to predict the future gives us little hope of understanding it, much less controlling it. Herbert’s triumph, the true lesson of Dune, is that the artist also has a way of cataloguing and interpreting the past, and how it has led to our present. The economist and historian spin their theories and endlessly argue their application, all the while cloaking themselves in the mantle of scholarship and science. But the great themes and their true understanding are the province of the artist. Homer and the Old Testament are our best means of truly understanding the Bronze Age, Tolkein gives us insight into a vanished Celtic Europe, and the Arthurian myths let us emotionally experience the transition from Pagan to Christian Britain. The past is prologue, of course, but not the past as it occurred, but as it is remembered. There is much to be learned from myth, it is the barely visible upper crust, the tip of the iceberg, of the collective subconscious.
The Dune novel cycle is not a science fiction Cliff Notes to modern industrial and resource politics or ecological and religious issues, but the artist has the ability to ponder subconsciously the great human themes and hidden currents that underlie superficial reality. Much is hidden from reason, in the end, we are forced to rely on our intuition. It is not infallible, but it is the only other tool we have. Like all great art, Dune examines those great themes which are not accessible to scientific investigation or historical scholarship. Whether they are “correct” or not is irrelevant, that isn’t even a question we should be asking. The artist is not concerned with the What or the How, which are always open to dispute, but the Why, which, hopefully, contains at least some fundamental core of transcendant, discernable Truth.
The spice must flow.
